Google TV Growing Pains: Networks Block Web TV Shows

Google’s throwing a party, but network TV is snubbing the invitation.

Three major broadcast networks are blocking Google TV’s access to their online programs. That’s not a good first sign for a product whose main purpose is to make internet content as easy to watch as your local station, whether you’re looking at a TV screen or your computer.

To be clear, ABC, NBC and CBS are not stopping their over-the-air programming from being viewed through Google TV, which is only now just going on sale. Watching programs that come from your cable or satellite feed are unaffected. But online versions of network programming — on the sites of the broadcasters, which are ordinarily accessible from any computer — are not available from Google TV, the Wall Street Journal first reported Friday.

And the reason is clearly to further postpone the time when you can cut the cord.

Convergence has been a hot topic for more than a decade but Google TV is the first serious attempt to combine the internet and broadcast television in sort of simple “one-click” way. It’s not about web surfing or e-mailing from your couch, but rather getting easy access to programs off the web as easily as you’d change channels. And, thanks to the broadcasters themselves, a lot of professional content already lives online.

In Google’s perfect world you pick up your remote and search for Star Trek and get it, whether it’s on Netflix, your media library or your cable company’s on-demand list. Google gets into your living room with a new way to provide search, and all the ways it has to make money off that.

With Google TV, it is selling convergence for dummies. There are already a myriad of other ways to patch your computer into your home entertainment system so that (say) you can watch online versions of programs hosted by Hulu Plus on your big-screen TV. But Google TV provides a neat system and interface that makes it unnecessary for you tie up your computer, figure out all the cabling and use as many different interfaces as there are services.

And it comes at a time of dizzying, overlapping options so numerous it’s difficult to assess what you “need.” There are a plethora of boxes that deliver content from Netflix and Amazon and web sources. With Tivo, you can search for videos on Google-owned YouTube. As screens get larger they are also getting smaller; TV on your smartphone or iPad are here now and you can use them to watch online programming in your living room just as easily as on your commute.

So it’s far from a certainty that the convenience of Google TV is enough to break through anyway — but it’s a very tough sell when so much potential content is out of bounds and it’s hard to explain what you have left without it.

Make no mistake: IP-delivered programming will be huge. The networks know it, and even though they put much of their own content online the business models of broadcasting the internet are miles apart.

“The networks aren’t blocking Google TV because it’s Google. They are blocking Google TV because it is putting a web TV show, with web TV show economics, on a TV, which would be incredibly disruptive to their business,” Learnmonth writes. “The reason the networks are blocking Google TV and Boxee (and Hulu is still PC-only) is about ad revenue: They don’t get enough of it from the web. And letting you watch Glee on your TV, but via the web and Google TV, means substituting high broadcast revenue for lower digital revenue.”

“Google TV enables access to all the web content you already get today on your phone and PC,” Google said in a statement. “But it is ultimately the content owner’s choice to restrict their fans from accessing their content on the platform.”